Conventionally, medicine dispensing devices such as the one disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 1995-200770 (hereinafter Patent document 1) are available. In the medicine dispensing device disclosed in Patent document 1, solid medicine in form of granular, capsule or the like can be packaged in one package at a time with a packaging paper and supplied. Further, the medicine dispensing device of Patent document 1 has a configuration, wherein solid medicine is imaged in a state of packaged in the packaging paper, and based on the obtained image, the quantity of the solid medicine can be inspected.
Because the medicine dispensing device according to the Patent document 1 images solid medicine packaged in a packaging paper, it is likely that the imaging is done in a state wherein many solid medicines piled up or in contact with each other in the packaging paper. When inspection of the quantity is done based on such an image, there is a high possibility that multiple solid medicines may get misidentified as a single mass, and the quantity of the solid medicines cannot be accurately determined.
Therefore, the object of the present invention is to provide a medicine inspection device in which proper inspection of the quantity of solid medicine is possible without occurrence of inspection failures due to overlap or contact of the solid medicines or the existence of a packaging paper, and a medicine dispensing device equipped with such a medicine inspection device.